Las Torres del Paine National Park

December in Santiago - 30 degrees and blazing sun... In an attempt to escape the heat, as well as making good use of the holiday season, we decided to travel to the southern tip of Chile and visit a part of the country which we haven't seen, yet: Patagonia.

One of the countries most famous national parks - Las Torres del Paine - was our first destination. The park is located about 6 hours by bus north of Punta Arenas, close to the Argentinian border.

© OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA

It features impressive glaciers, glacial lakes, Magellanic subpolar forests, plenty of wildlife and a well developed trail network including camp sites and mountain shelters. It's most famous sight are probably the "Torres", giant granite pillars which rise nearly vertically into the sky, exceeding 3000m at the highest point.

The good infrastructure, of course, is both blessing and curse. Blessing, because it provides a means for fragile city dwellers such as ourselves to experience first hand (blisters and knee pain included) the beauty of this spectacular part of Patagonia. Curse, because it also means that on any given day of the summer several thousand visitors can be found along the famous "W" route or the other paths.

Apart from the mild inconvenience of reducing everybody's wilderness experience as a result of this (i.e. you're never far away from other people & eroded foot paths), it also has more serious consequences as the outbreak of a big fire in the western part of the park only two days ago proved (some more info on current state of affairs here and on the BBC). Sadly, with so many visitors every year someone is going to do something stupid and then these things happen. We were in the affected area on our way to the Grey Glacier only a few days ago and fondly remember the Ñirre and Lenga forest, a large part of which must have already been consumed by the flames now.

The highlights of our 6 day (if you count travel there and back) Torres del Paine experience were:

• the trek to the Mirador del Torres (photo above)
• spotting 2 pumas (from a bus along the park road on our way to the Grey Glacier walk)
• the Grey Glacier, including walk there and back
• the grey foxes, guanacos, condors, ñandús and other wildlife
• "El Living" in Puerto Natales, could be the southern most veggie place in the world? (o:

What we could have done without:

• some fellow campers who obviously didn't walk enough during the day and felt the need to listen to music instead of the overwhelming nature at night
• the hotels... let's just say they are not exactly value for money (rip off...)
• the news of the fire when we got back 

While it would have been nice to stay longer, perhaps even do a multi-day backpacking trip, we had a great time and were lucky with the weather. It was a nice first introduction to Patagonia, and put us in the right mindset for our second part of our holidays, which you can read about in the next post.

A selection of photos below: